Let’s Play? An Examination of the ‘Level Playing Field’ in EU Free Trade Agreements

Abstract

Free Trade Agreements to which the European Union is a party increasingly contain minimum obligations with respect to taxation, subsidies, and labour and environmental standards. Those obligations have been termed, in a highly pervasive and rhetorically effective metaphor, the ‘level playing field’. This article is directly concerned with the concept of the level playing field. Specifically, it examines the level playing field concept vis-à-vis ‘free trade’, how it has been implemented in recent EU FTAs, particularly with respect to labour and environmental standards, why the concept seems to be gaining in influence and authority, and what that might mean for the liberal trading regime.